webtechgal

> In fact I'd wager that's why the "rich food culture" of the trains has "vanished."

Not by a long shot. Reduced? Certainly. Vanished? Certainly not. I think the author of the OP is writing based on her limited experience, with the Mumbai chef also chiming in under a similar condition.

> most Indians probably see as a laudable step toward modern comforts.

I don't think so. Some? May be. Most? Doubtful.

> ...and found this funny story...

No offense, but if you were at the receiving end of things, you probably won't find it funny. This (the 'biscuit bandit' thing - though I'm reading it described thus for the first time), has been a menace plaguing gullible travelers on India trains for many years now.

With millions of people traveling each day on thousands of routes across the length and breadth of the country, it is happy hunting grounds for the culprits. In some cases, people end up losing their life savings. Sad, shocking, but true all the same, even today.

Looks like they were rebooting or something. All working fine now, got the $5 credit using the promo code LAUNCH (without cc)... Can't wait to spin up an instance and try things out!!

Trying to register but keep getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. Is it just me?

Edit: Even the home page throwing up 502 now.

> it should not add more than $1 or so to your monthly fee.

Quite true. Most hosting companies charge around $1/mo. for a dedicated IPv4. (Naturally, not for shared plans but for VPS/dedicated boxes etc.)

> Run your own DNS server and even cache the hostname/IP pairs yourself.

This[1] might be a useful resource to get started:

[1] https://scans.io/

(Register and download the IPv4 Address Space data file to use as an initial cache and then append/update as you go.)

Good idea. However, I'll need to really exercise the gray cells to put together the list so it might take me a couple of days. Once done, I'll post it here.

We had also (obviously) built a (proprietary) ranking algo that took into account some 60+ individual factors. If it can be of any help, I'll create a list and send it to you.

It would be great if you can share (at least) some information about the kind of hosting setup you're using, how much of bandwidth and how long it took to crawl and index the 2B pages.

Great work, congrats. :-)

Here is some input based on my experience building a similar project at my former company. (We did not quite get to 2B pages, but were close to ~300M):

For creating a really viable (alternative) search engine, the freshness of your index is going to be a fairly important factor. Now, obviously, re-crawling a massive index frequently/regularly is going to need/consume some huge amounts of bandwidth + CPU cycles. Here is how we had optimized the resource utilization:

Corresponding to each indexed URL, store a 'Last Crawled' time-stamp.

Corresponding to each indexed URL, also store a sort-of 'crawl-history' (If space is a constraint, don't store each version of the URL, store only the latest one). On each re-crawl, store two data fields: time-stamp and a boolean if the URL content has changed since last crawl. As more re-crawl cycles run, you will be able to calculate/predict the 'update frequency' of each URL. Then, prioritize the re-crawls based on the update frequency score (i.e. re-crawl those with higher scores more frequently and the others less frequently).

If you need any more help/input, let me know and I'll be happy to do what I can.

HTH and all the best moving forward.

From Part 5 (Doing a demo):

> The stories should roll off your tongue since you’ve done it hundreds of times...

If I were a VC (not that it is likely to ever happen), and if your stories rolled off your tongue, it would set off some alarm bells ringing for me. If the stories roll so smoothly, just how many times have you told them before (apparently, without success)?

Many years ago, my ex-boss was in an informal pitch meeting with a very prominent tech lady (who is/was a limited partner at a major SV VC fund as well as an angel investor) and he mentioned that he had signed up an experienced Harvard MBA as the CFO and her reaction was along the line of 'Well, so what?'.

> a purchase for $30m may have been announced.

I was wild-guessing around the same ballpark too.

Here is some simple math I was thinking:

$3M round (a year ago) would have valued them around $10M.

Since then, then would probably have doubled or tripled their valuation, getting them to $20M to 30M at this point.

As a reality check, we're talking simple (and even not-so-simple) web site/app hosting options here (and not some NASA/space/military/healthcare grade requirements).

From my perspective (as a freelance web tech/dev professional who routinely manages close to two dozen hosting accounts for clients), what you're saying above comes very very close to driving a nail with a sledgehammer.

Wondering if the crux of the suit could be applicable/have implications in other parts of the world as well?

Not disrespecting your opinion here, but $5 Digital Ocean droplets[1] have been working quite well for me as well as for nearly two dozens of my clients, spanning across the last several years (taking into account all the four important parameters you've specified: quality, correctness of operation, data integrity and performance).

My (limited) experience with Vultr[2] has also been fairly satisfactory.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/ [2] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

True, but for how long?

Many commercially-smart people here colloquially describe this company as following (loose translation):

You can get some/any ultimate benefit out of them only if you're capable of extracting holy water out of a crow's back side!! :-)

I have no love lost for this guy - or his company - but to be fair, why can this not be thought of as a strategy to acquire (a mother lode of) future (paying) users? Kind of bait and switch? I would say the investment of 3 or 4 months of free service is negligible as compared to the long-term revenues that this strategy would bring in.

Any benefit/s derived via possible deep data mining would only be the icing on the cake.

Well, yes, but unfortunately, of the billion+ people here in India, I doubt if a significant percentage has even heard of a VPN, leave alone the matter of knowing what it does or knowing how to go about getting and setting one up.

Great!! Works like a charm... :-)

While you're at it, why not throw in the conversion to a few (popular) image formats as well? I can think of (at least) some scenarios where that would come in quite handy (e.g. posting long articles to Twitter).

All the best moving forward.

Heck - I'd settle even for a vet... any day...

> Why aren't there required 'debriefing' of medical staff and plane staff immediately following in-air medical emergencies?

IMO this suggestion is worth its weight in gold. Imagine what sort of a (valuable) resource could be created out of a databank of information culled from such incidences, growing with time.

A quick question here while I check some more:

Are pure-play software (SaaS etc.) and/or digital goods startups eligible for this?

> It's just a weird black-box sector of tech that almost nobody talks about. Not sure why though...

My thoughts exactly ...

Thanks for the heads up. Looking at the deal size (and the nature of the company), I'd have expected there to be at least some good interest/discussion on this at the HN community but apparently, not.

> Indian Railways is huge and celebrated as a backbone to the countries transportation.

This is not only true but a bit of an understatement as well. Railways has been treated as a very important part of the whole Indian economy since the time of independence. Isn't it the only department of the Government of India that merits its own, separate union budget? It may not be an exaggeration to say that railways is an integral part of the very fabric of life for a huge cross-section of the population of India.

From this perspective, I'd say offering free wi-fi at railway stations is a brilliant strategic move.

> It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today ...

Not aware of the state of affairs presently but until a couple of years ago, I used to run AdSense on a handful of India-centric sites and while there were a good number of advertisers, I almost never got anything more than a crappy 1 or 2 cents per click out of it. (By contrast, on several other sites with a global audience, I used to easily average 12 to 15 cents per click.)

> linguistic apartheid in India (other African countries incl.)

You appear to be a reasonably educated person, so I guess your use of the word 'other' above is a kind of oversight (because last that I knew, India was in Asia, and not in Africa).

> you need to feed the cow first...

I am sure the government - and all the citizens - of India will forever remain indebted to you for generously contributing and sharing this piece of infinite wisdom - whoever could have even thought of this otherwise?

Something to do with the WordPress Avada theme or one of the plug-ins/js I think.

Well, hello there and welcome back (I guess).

What I'm wondering is does the Internet need another social network today, in late(ish) 2016? With the sheer number of people online today (be it via the web or mobile) and the undeniable usefulness of social networking to the users at large, I'd say the answer is yes, sort of.

Would he (they) be able to (re)gain critical mass? I'd say my guess is as good as anybody's guess, but with the still lingering brand recall of orkut of the past, he has a better shot at it then, let's say, a totally new entrant.

Also, I did not find any info on how this is funded - it would certainly be interesting to know something about this.